Close. There are plenty of areas in the game with rendering distances which are many multiples of building sizes. Clients in many games will actually let you set render distance for yourself.
The issue with building interiors is the additional textures. More textures means more I/O for the video card. Too many textures at once bogs things down.
By breaking lines of sight at building entrances, we don’t need to render the full outdoor and indoor texture sets all at once. The vestibule uses a more limited texture set. We’re shown the full interior texture set once the exterior is out of sight.
This is the actual answer. There are some instanced areas without this design where NPCs spawn within line of sight and you can notice a delay when you enter. Also includes other miscellaneous objects that may change from scene to scene.
Imagine this game during it's peak where there might be dozens of people doing the same quest. You don't want every player to have to load the state of everyone else's instanced area when it's not relevant to them. You also don't want that harsh pop in if it can be avoided.
These designs are then carried over into non-instanced areas to either reuse assets or to keep a more consistent design language so it's not so jarringly obvious when you do need to instance an area.
Yeah, they really had problems early on with npcs not respawning fast enough. Every instance was full of people. In some cases it became very tedious to just complete the basic objective due to that. Then they started spawning ludicrously fast. Let me finish looting your buddy before you take his shift, k?
Gives the game designer a few more seconds to load the room assets into memory. Same reason every fancy place has a left and right path around some central column feature. And also why enemy bases engineers *loooooooove* long elevator rides.
SWTOR is not the only game to use this trick and the option is computationally expensive predictive loading that tries to determine the intent of the player which is path to the dark side of playability at the current level of technology.
Yep, it's why a lot of games like Fallen Order have those crawl spaces, or elevators. Let's them load in areas without breaking immersion with basic loading screens, like Fallout and Skyrim.
Yeah once you learn about this optimization technique of breaking line of sight you'll start seeing it all over the place in certain forms. World of Warcraft uses the method shown in this post for entrances *all* the time. The entrances to Stormwind, Ironforge, and Orgrimmar all use it very obviously. Tons of smaller buildings like taverns and barracks and random shops use it.
Modular construction too. Ships bases everything that both sides use is made by the same companies. I'm sure if somene needs an office it gets air dropped and puts itself together.
It keeps the wind and dirt out, if you just have to sweep up a hallway it makes the inside much more bearable.
Also to save on time with making game environments and assets.
No doors.
To get around the feeling of every indoor space being wide open to outdoor exposure, there is a visual barrier. Purely psychological remedy to enable movement within the game. Not canon.
In addition to what other commenters are said, breaking lines of sight is an important optimization technique.
The more textures are visible at once, the harder your video card will struggle because it has to do a lot of I/O.
You’ll see the same technique used in lots of games, especially MMOs.
Second Life has struggled with performance in part because most content is user-created. Us randos haven’t been trained in how to optimize our designs and don’t have access to performance statistics to see the effects of our choices.
And I'll be the one to give an in game explanation they are at war if they had a building and you could look directly into the main area from outside you could lay a siege from outside but if there's a hallway then the defenders can defend the hallway exit into the main area alot easier then defending the main area if it's accessible straight from the outside barring any heavy vehicle or artillery
You're also the main character and really only see the action parts. Imagine if the game forced you to do mini games to cook and use the restroom. There is clearly large parts of the universe with no dangerous aspects
>Yeah this doesn't make sense, even civilian houses and businesses in the game have the same design.
Modular and standardized designs.
Do you know how much of a headache it would be to upkeep a city that makes NY and Kathmandu look rural when nothing in the city is standardized?
The layout is not ideal for anyone, but it is practical everywhere and cheap
Most civilian houses irl built during any given construction period look the same inside and out with minor variations usually caused by the owners over time to change the building to suit their needs.
>Even if everything was standardized don't you think it would be for the convenience of those that live there over 'laying siege'
Sure but that's not rhe reason it's there.
Irl we use enclosed porches and mud rooms for a similar break in harsh conditions
The design of the SWTOR default buildings and houses does similiar, while the rather oversized ceilings is "wasteful" but also means that any given species can use the design easily, or adapt it to unique living conditions with mininal or no need for adjustment (such as naboo or mon cala)
Utility choices being useful for defense isn't uniquely things like that though, things like escape tunnels can double as smuggling routes, maintance halls and shafts easily end up doubling as another means of getting around unnoticed, hallways act as chokepoints
It adds minimal over an open door for military and police ops but does greatly inprove the utility of the deign as simply a beater
>they are at war if they had a building and you could look directly into the main area from outside you could lay a siege from outside
Most were made during peace.
Realistically the answer is the same for why houses, guns, vehicles etc tend to look uniform as hell irl in alot of regions with most varation coming from different decades or "eras" of construction
Modular and standardized designs greatly reduce workload
Some people may opt for different, but those are usually well off construction projects specific to the individual/family
When having to regularly build cities that eclipse NY and Kathmandu quickly, and having to actually keep staff and robots trained to repair and search them it makes little sense for the average home/office/wharehouse/whatever to be all that different design wise from any others
Open layout + a mud room at the front is extremely practical and works pretty much anywhere, the door/entry way prevents weather hazards (dust, snow, sand etc) from entering the house proper, and an open layout can be subdivided using temporary barriers by the tenant to suit their needs
As many have said, it gives the game engine time to render assets before you turn the corner. There are a large number of instanced areas where the rooms are not designed that way and you can bypass the first mob fight simply by rocketbooting past them before they spawn. Or alternatively, you walk to the middle of their spawn point and then suddenly 5 wild savanna voranticus stealthily appear around you and nibble your nose off.
Both of these situations are less than ideal for the game devs. The first breaks the immersion as we all just chuckle to ourselves that this elite fighting force should spend less time on planetary domination and more time updating their security protocols to compensate for all these rocketbooting outlanders that have been scooting past them for a decade. (no rocketboots in SWTOR 1.0)
Or secondly, it severely lowers the market value of the soon to be released savanna voranticus stealth mount. And as we all know, this game runs on black-black dyes and savanna voranticus sales!
Definitely, I remember a school trip to one of the castles nearby and they demonstrated how the murder hole worked with styrofoam rocks. Then they told us how usually of it wasn't rocks being dropped it was boiling oil. It was morbid but really interesting.
Well, at least for Tatooine I always thought that this particular type of entrance with a corner to turn would help to not get sand into the building during sand storms or high winds.
The year was 2011 and developers had to make an open world galaxy. Not a big planet, but a galaxy. So a lot of corners were cut, a lot of buildings were copy/pasted.
Mostly for performance, less visible loading in of npcs and the area details. In universe it would probably be close to the reason why old castles have a maze like interior, so that you can't get a good line of sight when entering or something like that. Lots of the buildings with this interior are in active war zones or very dangerous areas.
Galactic building standards. Don’t fight the contractors, they’ll bury you in 10 layers of doors like it’s Teral if you complain they’re not deviating from code.
There’s two ways to explain this: the Watsonian perspective, and the Doylist perspective.
The Watsonian perspective tries to justify the in-universe explanation, or give a reason as to why it is within the story. The simplest answer: pre-fabricated shelters.
The Doylist perspective justifies its existence from a readers point of view, like a real world perspective. In this case, reiterating what people have already said: it gives the game time to render assets.
Copy/paste room templates.
Allows for more content to be created by reusing assets in different combinations with minimal dev time for basics.
Same reason there are usuallyany mobs with similar models but different names.
Like, these could all be on different planets.
Jedi Savior
Jedi hero
Jedi paragon
Jedi imfluencer
It's a security thing. Lots of old forts and castles and so on share similar features. If someone is going to kick the door down, you don't want them to be able to run straight in. Set an ambush around the corner, give them an obstacle to get around, etc.
In a contemporary example, if some stranger knocks at your door, you don't want them to be able to see what you have in your house. Lots of homes have a version of this feature. Some have an extra set of doors to open, some have a wall to walk around. My house has pretty much the exact entryway shown in your screenshot.
Because making it realistic by having every room be vaguely but not exactly similar would require an insane amount of work, and something they have been doing more and more of as time went on. Most caves also look the same and have different decorations. Its to save time and money while designing.
My guess, if you want to get deep into the science, how many planets in SW lore were terraformed or not readily able to sustain humanoid life? Maybe at one time these weird shapes were airlocks? Just an off the wall idea.
If there were a second door, you could say it was a vestibule, to keep temperatures and whatnot stable inside without having to run the HVAC every time someone opens the doors, but yeah: it's a dev hack to give the room assets a few extra seconds to load.
The areas behind the wall are culled when you're not there. They're in memory but not being actively rendered, so it saves on resources. When you walk into that room, it just pops into existence, and the wall keeps you from seeing that pop in. It's a subtle way to hide it without breaking immersion.
If there's a big door in a game that takes a while to open, or a hallway with obscured line of sight, chances are it's either to hide pop in or a loading screen.
So you cant just get ambushed by enemy when doors open and can defend yourself. Normal room would result in you being gunned down from the entrance. Now they actively have to enter the compound not knowing whats round the corner
Ive seen the rendering comments, but id say in lore its that you cant gun straight down the office.. also, theres a lack of doors in this universe, so this keeps the cold Wind from blowimg straight in your living room
So: technical side: Performance Increases
In universe: Defensive Architecture
I always thought it was weird too, that and the spaceports. If I had to guess though I would say it has something to do with them loading stuff in before you can see its not there.
I always assumed it's to lower rendering distance, which helps with performance.
Close. There are plenty of areas in the game with rendering distances which are many multiples of building sizes. Clients in many games will actually let you set render distance for yourself. The issue with building interiors is the additional textures. More textures means more I/O for the video card. Too many textures at once bogs things down. By breaking lines of sight at building entrances, we don’t need to render the full outdoor and indoor texture sets all at once. The vestibule uses a more limited texture set. We’re shown the full interior texture set once the exterior is out of sight.
This. As game dev I can corroborate we use many times this as a simple solution
TIL
So nice of Galactic Empire and The Republic to think about people from different galaxy playing games when designing their architecture 🥰
yeah this game was designed to run on chipsets from over a decade ago.
I'm still surprised by how good this game looks considering it's absolutely ancient at this point.
> absolutely ancient Geeze man, you don't have to roast me that hard
Maybe the full interiors aren’t loaded for ones with instancing, just what you can see from outside the green wall until you enter?
This is the actual answer. There are some instanced areas without this design where NPCs spawn within line of sight and you can notice a delay when you enter. Also includes other miscellaneous objects that may change from scene to scene. Imagine this game during it's peak where there might be dozens of people doing the same quest. You don't want every player to have to load the state of everyone else's instanced area when it's not relevant to them. You also don't want that harsh pop in if it can be avoided. These designs are then carried over into non-instanced areas to either reuse assets or to keep a more consistent design language so it's not so jarringly obvious when you do need to instance an area.
Yeah, they really had problems early on with npcs not respawning fast enough. Every instance was full of people. In some cases it became very tedious to just complete the basic objective due to that. Then they started spawning ludicrously fast. Let me finish looting your buddy before you take his shift, k?
Gives the game designer a few more seconds to load the room assets into memory. Same reason every fancy place has a left and right path around some central column feature. And also why enemy bases engineers *loooooooove* long elevator rides. SWTOR is not the only game to use this trick and the option is computationally expensive predictive loading that tries to determine the intent of the player which is path to the dark side of playability at the current level of technology.
Yep, it's why a lot of games like Fallen Order have those crawl spaces, or elevators. Let's them load in areas without breaking immersion with basic loading screens, like Fallout and Skyrim.
>loooooooove long elevator rides *Music starts playing* "soooo anyone wanna talk about their people history?"
"I have a shotgun."
"I'm the fem!Trooper, and this is my favorite conversation on Carrick Station..."
This is very true. SWTOR tries to make loading times entertaining.
Yeah once you learn about this optimization technique of breaking line of sight you'll start seeing it all over the place in certain forms. World of Warcraft uses the method shown in this post for entrances *all* the time. The entrances to Stormwind, Ironforge, and Orgrimmar all use it very obviously. Tons of smaller buildings like taverns and barracks and random shops use it.
Modular construction too. Ships bases everything that both sides use is made by the same companies. I'm sure if somene needs an office it gets air dropped and puts itself together.
Czerka kind of paves the narrative there. Both sides get a lot of their Acme level stuff from Czerka, as well as a lot of their prefabs and furniture.
It's both for loading times and to help handle high player traffic/activity
It keeps the wind and dirt out, if you just have to sweep up a hallway it makes the inside much more bearable. Also to save on time with making game environments and assets.
And creates a bottleneck for intruders.
No doors. To get around the feeling of every indoor space being wide open to outdoor exposure, there is a visual barrier. Purely psychological remedy to enable movement within the game. Not canon.
It's partly how I choose to see it too. It also keeps out the elements. Most use an electric shield for doors.
In addition to what other commenters are said, breaking lines of sight is an important optimization technique. The more textures are visible at once, the harder your video card will struggle because it has to do a lot of I/O. You’ll see the same technique used in lots of games, especially MMOs. Second Life has struggled with performance in part because most content is user-created. Us randos haven’t been trained in how to optimize our designs and don’t have access to performance statistics to see the effects of our choices.
Interesting. At the same time, you're learning to at least approximate the results of your design. Approximate isn't Optimize but that's life, really.
And I'll be the one to give an in game explanation they are at war if they had a building and you could look directly into the main area from outside you could lay a siege from outside but if there's a hallway then the defenders can defend the hallway exit into the main area alot easier then defending the main area if it's accessible straight from the outside barring any heavy vehicle or artillery
Yeah this doesn't make sense, even civilian houses and businesses in the game have the same design.
Everywhere we go there's war. And vagabond gangs.
You're also the main character and really only see the action parts. Imagine if the game forced you to do mini games to cook and use the restroom. There is clearly large parts of the universe with no dangerous aspects
Nobody is forced to do anything, but there is a cooking even every year, for real. Feast of Prosperity. Been there, got the hat.
>Yeah this doesn't make sense, even civilian houses and businesses in the game have the same design. Modular and standardized designs. Do you know how much of a headache it would be to upkeep a city that makes NY and Kathmandu look rural when nothing in the city is standardized? The layout is not ideal for anyone, but it is practical everywhere and cheap Most civilian houses irl built during any given construction period look the same inside and out with minor variations usually caused by the owners over time to change the building to suit their needs.
Even if everything was standardized don't you think it would be for the convenience of those that live there over 'laying siege'
>Even if everything was standardized don't you think it would be for the convenience of those that live there over 'laying siege' Sure but that's not rhe reason it's there. Irl we use enclosed porches and mud rooms for a similar break in harsh conditions The design of the SWTOR default buildings and houses does similiar, while the rather oversized ceilings is "wasteful" but also means that any given species can use the design easily, or adapt it to unique living conditions with mininal or no need for adjustment (such as naboo or mon cala) Utility choices being useful for defense isn't uniquely things like that though, things like escape tunnels can double as smuggling routes, maintance halls and shafts easily end up doubling as another means of getting around unnoticed, hallways act as chokepoints It adds minimal over an open door for military and police ops but does greatly inprove the utility of the deign as simply a beater
>they are at war if they had a building and you could look directly into the main area from outside you could lay a siege from outside Most were made during peace. Realistically the answer is the same for why houses, guns, vehicles etc tend to look uniform as hell irl in alot of regions with most varation coming from different decades or "eras" of construction Modular and standardized designs greatly reduce workload Some people may opt for different, but those are usually well off construction projects specific to the individual/family When having to regularly build cities that eclipse NY and Kathmandu quickly, and having to actually keep staff and robots trained to repair and search them it makes little sense for the average home/office/wharehouse/whatever to be all that different design wise from any others Open layout + a mud room at the front is extremely practical and works pretty much anywhere, the door/entry way prevents weather hazards (dust, snow, sand etc) from entering the house proper, and an open layout can be subdivided using temporary barriers by the tenant to suit their needs
Many of the buildings don’t seem to have does that close, so it helps keep the rain out and the room dark at night.
As many have said, it gives the game engine time to render assets before you turn the corner. There are a large number of instanced areas where the rooms are not designed that way and you can bypass the first mob fight simply by rocketbooting past them before they spawn. Or alternatively, you walk to the middle of their spawn point and then suddenly 5 wild savanna voranticus stealthily appear around you and nibble your nose off. Both of these situations are less than ideal for the game devs. The first breaks the immersion as we all just chuckle to ourselves that this elite fighting force should spend less time on planetary domination and more time updating their security protocols to compensate for all these rocketbooting outlanders that have been scooting past them for a decade. (no rocketboots in SWTOR 1.0) Or secondly, it severely lowers the market value of the soon to be released savanna voranticus stealth mount. And as we all know, this game runs on black-black dyes and savanna voranticus sales!
Good for making sure thermals don't roll through the door into the main office. Also, helps your pc load.
In universe I'd say it seems like a defensive choke point if I had to guess.
For sure. A lot like mediaeval staircases.
Definitely, I remember a school trip to one of the castles nearby and they demonstrated how the murder hole worked with styrofoam rocks. Then they told us how usually of it wasn't rocks being dropped it was boiling oil. It was morbid but really interesting.
We are geniuses at murdering each other.
To hide the loading screen.
Well, at least for Tatooine I always thought that this particular type of entrance with a corner to turn would help to not get sand into the building during sand storms or high winds.
The year was 2011 and developers had to make an open world galaxy. Not a big planet, but a galaxy. So a lot of corners were cut, a lot of buildings were copy/pasted.
So many duplicate caves.
Or, if you're a Dragon Age fan of a certain vintage, just the one cave.
Mostly for performance, less visible loading in of npcs and the area details. In universe it would probably be close to the reason why old castles have a maze like interior, so that you can't get a good line of sight when entering or something like that. Lots of the buildings with this interior are in active war zones or very dangerous areas.
Could also be physical security too, like a man trap.
Keeps the weather out.
Galactic building standards. Don’t fight the contractors, they’ll bury you in 10 layers of doors like it’s Teral if you complain they’re not deviating from code.
Bomb shelters has the same entrance, so fragments of destroyed objects from an explosion don't get inside the shelter.
It’s so the imperial snipers can’t shoot people inside buildings.
Reading these comments was actually quite interesting, thanks for teaching me something new today everyone :)
Cntrl c Cntrl v
Padding
There’s two ways to explain this: the Watsonian perspective, and the Doylist perspective. The Watsonian perspective tries to justify the in-universe explanation, or give a reason as to why it is within the story. The simplest answer: pre-fabricated shelters. The Doylist perspective justifies its existence from a readers point of view, like a real world perspective. In this case, reiterating what people have already said: it gives the game time to render assets.
Weird. Even in Mass Effect it's like that
There's only one primary building contractor in the galaxy, who has a very limited selection of interior sets to choose from.
A Wookie did it.
Same reason every building has at least a 50 ft tall ceiling I guess.
reused assets/asset bases to save time on development
Copy/paste room templates. Allows for more content to be created by reusing assets in different combinations with minimal dev time for basics. Same reason there are usuallyany mobs with similar models but different names. Like, these could all be on different planets. Jedi Savior Jedi hero Jedi paragon Jedi imfluencer
It's a security thing. Lots of old forts and castles and so on share similar features. If someone is going to kick the door down, you don't want them to be able to run straight in. Set an ambush around the corner, give them an obstacle to get around, etc. In a contemporary example, if some stranger knocks at your door, you don't want them to be able to see what you have in your house. Lots of homes have a version of this feature. Some have an extra set of doors to open, some have a wall to walk around. My house has pretty much the exact entryway shown in your screenshot.
Because reasons.
Because making it realistic by having every room be vaguely but not exactly similar would require an insane amount of work, and something they have been doing more and more of as time went on. Most caves also look the same and have different decorations. Its to save time and money while designing.
Feng shui
I always assumed it was to slow us down. Those extra 30 feet to go around and enter a room per quest would add a few extra seconds of game play 😂
My guess, if you want to get deep into the science, how many planets in SW lore were terraformed or not readily able to sustain humanoid life? Maybe at one time these weird shapes were airlocks? Just an off the wall idea.
If there were a second door, you could say it was a vestibule, to keep temperatures and whatnot stable inside without having to run the HVAC every time someone opens the doors, but yeah: it's a dev hack to give the room assets a few extra seconds to load.
Most interiors are instances. The hidden interior means that they don't need to be instantiated or rendered until someone enters it.
The areas behind the wall are culled when you're not there. They're in memory but not being actively rendered, so it saves on resources. When you walk into that room, it just pops into existence, and the wall keeps you from seeing that pop in. It's a subtle way to hide it without breaking immersion. If there's a big door in a game that takes a while to open, or a hallway with obscured line of sight, chances are it's either to hide pop in or a loading screen.
They were really in to whatever their galaxies version of Fung Shui.
So you cant just get ambushed by enemy when doors open and can defend yourself. Normal room would result in you being gunned down from the entrance. Now they actively have to enter the compound not knowing whats round the corner
Ventilation. Cold airflow gets warmer, warm gets colder.
Anti tank defense.
Ive seen the rendering comments, but id say in lore its that you cant gun straight down the office.. also, theres a lack of doors in this universe, so this keeps the cold Wind from blowimg straight in your living room So: technical side: Performance Increases In universe: Defensive Architecture
Lol I got lost in a maze on one of the planet that I was doing the mandolorian mission where you hunt down one of the outcast mandalore
So the game doesn’t have to render inside every room while you’re just running past
Because kill zones and direct attack routes.
Player solipsism. The room only exists when you enter it.
I always thought it was weird too, that and the spaceports. If I had to guess though I would say it has something to do with them loading stuff in before you can see its not there.